Monday, February 4, 2013

In last weeks on-line edition of pdn David Walker talks with Joel Meyerowitz, part two of a conversation. The interview concludes with this profound comment from Meyerowitz about the essence of photography......when you're actually living your life and you're not
in a race. What's the race? To where? To [what] end? I don't want to
get to the end too fast. I want to enjoy the languor of just living,
recognizing, acknowledging, taking it in, sort of amplifying it in some
way. [Photography] is a great medium for that. It happens in an instant,
but it gives you hours or days of time to reflect on things. It’s a
beautiful system, this game of photography, to see in an instant and go
back and think about later on. It's pure philosophy. And poetry.
You can read the rest of the piece HERE and go to the link for part one of the conversation.

And for those of you fortunate enough to be in Paris you can get along to the MEP - Maison Europeenne de la Photographie - for their Meyerowitz retrospective. This survey show opened January 23 and runs until April 7. They say this... Born in 1938 in New York, Meyerowitz began photographing the city
in black
and white with a 35mm camera after meeting Robert Frank in 1962. In
the mid 1960s, a long trip to Europe marked a turning point in his
career. Only in the 1970s
did he begin working exclusively in colour. This colour work revolutionised the history of
photography. Joel Meyerowitz developed a highly individual style, capturing “the
decisive instant” with a 35mm camera and revealing the beauty of
reality
using a 20 x 25 Deardorff view camera. This
retrospective presents both his early black and white photographs
and his colour work, including the famous pictures of the ruins of the
World Trade Center in New York following the events of 11 September
2001.

Here is a comment about the young dancer image at the top of this post.The glow of early morning light casts a golden hue on brick facades,
tickles protruding metallic edges and carries with it the promise of the
new day. The scene might be from Any City, U.S.A., but when
photographer Joel Meyerowitz focuses his lens on “Young Dancer, 34th
Street and 9th Ave., 1978,” the presence of New York City’s Empire State
Building makes its geography clear.
Despite the photograph’s title, Meyerowitz’s subject is not so much the
young woman wearing a green dress standing in the foreground. Instead,
the subject is the city’s iconic pinnacle standing resolutely in the
background, pointing toward the heavens in the glow of the light
streaming from behind and set apart from the shadows of buildings that
frame either side.
Yet she is there, the young dancer in the foreground of the photograph,
the lower portions of her otherwise bare legs wrapped and cushioned in
thick layers of stocking stuffed into the “buffalo” platform sandals so
fashionable at the time. Her dress flows around her erect frame, its
green fabric a complement to the orange and gold hues of the building
behind her, her proud, straight stance a vertical parallel to the Empire
State Building of which she appears so unaware. Tiny pops of green
repeat in the background on a woman’s coat, on a car parked down the
street.
The early morning light comes from behind, from middle to upper left in
the photograph, bathing the foreground, the dancer and the building
behind her in warm, buttery gold and orange hues, leaving pale touches
of magenta on the otherwise gray sidewalk. In contrast, the natural
sunlight reflects almost harshly off the windows of a building further
down the street, orange light bursting from a ball of white. The framed
artwork atop the foreground building gives nod to the new day as well – a
child-like illustration of sun rising behind a tree at the top of a
mountain. Light gently highlights golden window frames surrounding
yellow bananas, reflects from the yellow doorframes that welcome the
viewer to follow the light down the sidewalk, down the street to the
pinnacle at its end. The repetition of horizontal lines in the brick,
in the naked rows of fluorescent tubes that form a sort of musical staff
above the dancer, in the rows of windows and the cracks of the
sidewalks contrast with the vertical thrust of the city that grows up
from beneath, all of it visually grounded by the silent young woman.
While everything appears to be pointed toward the icon that is almost
suspended in the pale blue sky – the street, the sidewalk, a man walking
away from the camera and toward the light ahead - the dancer faces away
to the outside left of the frame. Her expression indicates she is
waiting or searching, maybe both – perhaps for an elusive taxicab,
perhaps for the friend she will meet for an early morning chat over
coffee.
At first glance, one might assume “Young Dancer” is an example of
Meyerowitz’s classic street photography made with a 35mm camera;
however, this photo was made two years after his transition to and eight
by 10-inch view camera. According to Meyerowitz in “Creating a Sense of
Place (Photographers at Work)” , with the 35mm, “You hold a small
camera in your hand, something happens in front of you, and click, you
take a picture. A hand-held camera allows you to react in a split
second.” The basic difference with the 8 by 10 was one of mechanics, he
said, but it produced the color replication he sought.
“By using the view camera I gave up the instantaneous gestural response
to things that I produced with the 35mm. But what I tried to bring to
the 8 x 10 was the same sensation of immediacy. If I was struck by
something, I tried to have the 8 x 10 camera ready to make a picture
quickly. I felt I was bringing a street attitude to the 8 x 10,”
Meyerowitz said.
“Young Dancer, 34th Street and 9th Ave., 1978” is part of the larger
whole of Meyerowitz’s Empire State series. Meyerowitz was born in New
York City in 1938 and continues to live there today. He said in “The
Nature of Cities” that a “particular breed of photographer loves the
theater of city streets. Think of the scale of this stage where human
beings are seen against a backdrop of sixty-story skyscrapers! Nowhere
is the human comedy more boldly visible than on the streets of New York
City.”

About Me

My pictures explore the strange anthropology of cities. The unusual and overlooked in the human landscape.
I am asking the viewer to question the idea that photographs as documents are complete representations of subject.
I'm interested in the universality of life and the idea of parallel lives - when one thing is happening here, something else is happening over there. The democracy of non-places fascinates me, in the knowledge that inevitably nothing is as it seems.
I work and live between Auckland and Paris.
http://harveybenge.com/
email:harvey.benge@xtra.co.nz